Layman’s guide to doing Lean

Chirag PatelCo-founder | Chicago Health 2.0 | @CHIHealthTech

Dir of Software Dev | ContextMedia | @ContextMediaInc

chirag@chicagohealthtech.org@patelc75

How many of you are doing lean?

How many of you want to do lean but

too busy?

Who is early stage and how early stage are you?

“Get out of the building”

- every Lean evangelist known to man (easier said than done)

Why did I need lean?I built this interface that was rarely used

Mobile versionAt home version

Next product: Lean1st product: Not Lean

I’m going to try lean

Before I learned about lean, I knew I wanted

to focus on user stories instead of

features

But I already have an idea/solution

Our “non-lean” schedule from our 1st product

Build demo with features

based on assumptions

Month 8Start Month 4

FeedbackBuild slightly better

demo

Make

assump-

tions

Often wasted time & money

Expensive

Non-

Lean

Needed to fix this

Stage 1: Problem/Solution FitKey Questions: Do I have a problem worth solving? Does anyone care about my solution? Are they willing to pay?

my “lean experiment” focuses here

Stages of product lifecycle

…. and focused on the “Problem” box in the business model canvas

“Who do I think are my early

evangelists?”

Proactive senior

Early evangelists as an experiment to figure out largest addressable market

Declining Senior

I started by drawing my customer/user segment hypotheses and looking for early evangelist

Post Discharge Senior

Declining independently living senior with busy caregiver daughter

“It is better to be wrong than vague. If you are wrong, you iterate; if you are vague, you have wasted your time and cannot draw any conclusions.”

Cooper, Brant; Vlaskovits, Patrick; Blank, Steven (2010-10-15). The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany (p. 74). Cooper-Vlaskovits. Kindle Edition.

I started with what I thought were my top problems aka my hypotheses

….but decoupled the problem and solution

But, I can’t get my mind off solutions

and really wanna build my idea

But gotta stay focused on validating the problem

This solution/product I already have in mind should be renamed to my “first hypothesis”.

After hypothesis, problem interview and then solution interview

Source: “Running Lean”

“How do I identify a problem worth

solving?

What do I ask?”

I broadly asked“What are your top

problems with caregiving your mom?”

While focusing on the ones I could solve

But also“How are you solving them

today?”

and

“And what does it cost you to solve them?”

Now“How do I find interviewees?”

5 friends (don’t interview) X

5 friends of friends= 25 folks

Step by step interview process

Broad Problem interview summary“What are your top problems with caregiving for your mom?”

Narrow Problem interview summary“What are your top problems with your mom’s ADLs?”

Admittedly, I also interviewed the “solution” during the problem interview

How I did the solution interview:

Watch them use your solution!

1. Paint a picture2. Don’t say anything about the solution3. Prep them to “talk out loud”4. Practice talking out loud on another

product/site

Track EverywhereMom goes

A single hypothesis came from a resonatingproblem (told during interviews without asking)

Don’t know when Mom went to the doctor

→

HYPOTHESIS STICKY

Declining elderly seniors

Then created my early evangelist “persona card”(eldest daughter caregiver)

MVT1: Omnigraffle mockup

MVT2: Unbounce Landing page

MVT3: Clickable InvisionApp Mockups

MVP1: RhoMobile cross-platform app (started concurrently with MVP2)

I thought of them as MVTs (Minimum Viable Tests) instead of MVPs.

I did a mockup of a landing page as my MVT1

(using Omnigraffle)

Example learnings from iterating:• Voice recorder feature idea

I put the Omnigraffle mockup MVP1 in front of people!

Declining elderly seniors

Here’s mydeployable landing page in Unbouncepage, goodenough!

Unbounce has weight feature so you can easily do A/B experiments

To be charge or

not to be charge?

All the while, I was interviewing all our stakeholders, not just the end users

We had our fair share of health tech complexities

but we didn’t make excuses

Sales Cycle

And learned a simplemessage to the stakeholders

was absolutely essentialfor our sales cycle

“Like Philips but automatic”

And we lived happily ever after

For me, lean is validating learnings on both the problem and

solution before spending time and

money unnecessarily

So how did lean help me?

It’s not about saving time (or shitty MVPs)

Build demo with features

based on assumptions

Problem InterviewsLo-fi

Mock

-ups

Month 8Start Month 4

MVP demo appor clickablemockup

Solu-

tion

Inter-

views

Interviews + Metric tracking

Feedback

Hi-fi

Mock

-ups

Build slightly better

demo

Solu-

tion

Inter-

views

Make

assump-

tions

Often wasted time & money

ScalableProduct

Expensive

Much cheaper

Non-

Lean

Lean

Even longer in

healthcare

Solve “empathy” and “stickiness early!

“The Lean Startup” had great stories, but not actionable

• Actionable • Jumped around these books and skipped sections• Consumed in small chunks

“I don’t know where to start”

Started with these books!

Every week, I met with another (trusted) startup also doing lean

I started meeting advisors early. Don’t wait for the “right time”

Problem interview

MVPs & Solution

Interviews

Landing Page launch

Surveys, focus groups, etc

Best practice Research

Shadowing/Inquiry

Everything else

(dev, biz, sales, fundraising, tech ops, etc)

My approach is a subset of a larger holistic approach

LeftoverSlides

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

- gratuitous Henry Ford quote

I quickly filled a Lean Canvas for the (specific) Dr. Appt “story”